Art of Darkness with photographs

Mike Ramsey

Sunday

May 27, 2007 at 12:01 AMMay 27, 2007 at 8:23 PM

A former industrial building in Chicago’s South Loop district houses a one-of-a-kind museum of art done by Vietnam veterans. Not surprisingly, it’s an often grim sequence of paintings, sculptures and other expressions about the horrors of war.

Editors: For release Monday, May 28, and thereafter

The National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum is at 1801 S. Indiana Ave., south of Chicago’s Loop. It is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays. General admission is $10 per person; students are $7 each. For more information, call (312) 326-9767 during business hours or visit www.nvvam.org.

By MIKE RAMSEY

GATEHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

CHICAGO — Be forewarned: Battle wounds are reopened here.

A former industrial building in Chicago’s South Loop district houses a one-of-a-kind museum of art done by Vietnam veterans. Not surprisingly, it’s an often grim sequence of paintings, sculptures and other expressions about the horrors of war.

“These are things that need to be looked at,” said Mike Helbing, curator of the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum. “I’m not saying that war is never to be used. Part of what this is about, though, is what the cost of it is ... It’s not to be used lightly.”

Some of the rawest material includes nightmarish paintings and drawings by the late Richard Yohnka, who wrote of trying to capture the “depersonalized soldier.” In his work “Goodbye Mom and Dad,” a demonic-looking GI wearing a belt of bullets leers from the canvas. In the red-and-black pastel “I’m Hit,” two skeletal warriors carry off a comrade who appears skinned alive.

Some art at the museum is less blatant but just as thought-provoking. Helbing, who spent more than a year in Vietnam setting up radio networks for the Army, created the composition “In the Jar of Mars” by stuffing iconic toy soldiers into a clear container of coiled bologna. The effect is claustrophobic.

“The concept was, you’re stuck in this jar and you can’t get out,” Helbing, 60, said. “And then it’s totally random. When Mars (the god of war) is hungry, he’ll just reach in.”

The acclaimed not-for-profit museum has some 2,000 pieces of art in its collection and attracts 15,000 visitors annually. It opened in 1996 in a city-donated building but has its origins in a 1981 exhibit that generated wide notice and long lines of spectators.

Joe Fornelli was among the surprised contributing artists. The year before, he was painting watercolor bird scenes. But squirreled away in his Park Ridge attic were different kinds of works — about 50 studies he inked on the fly in 1965 as part of an Army helicopter crew in Vietnam.

An acquaintance saw the pieces and was mesmerized, Fornelli recalled. She suggested displaying the work, and he agreed.

“I didn’t think anybody would understand what they were looking at,” said Fornelli, a 64-year-old art restorer. “I was wrong about that. I was wrong and naive about ... how art affects people and can affect people.”

Art therapy is now acknowledged as a coping mechanism for veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, which is itself a relatively new area of treatment. Most of the museum’s art was generated by veterans after they returned stateside. Fornelli’s art is an exception. He said he tried to paint about the war when he first got home but found the experience “haunting and troubling.”

With the Vietnam veteran population aging and Iraq in the public consciousness, the museum has broadened its scope to feature art from the latest wave of American combat troops.

Last year, former Illinois National Guard member Aaron Hughes became the first Iraq war veteran to display work at the site. His self-portraits reflect his experiences transporting supplies in the unstable country from 2003 to 2004.

On his Web site (aarhughes.org), the 25-year-old Hughes expresses anguish about the begging Iraqi children he frequently saw along the road. One painting depicts him next to two of the waifs; they fade away like ghosts.

“I think everyone has to deal with their own demons in their own way,” Hughes, a University of Illinois fine-arts graduate, said in a telephone interview. “Not everyone feels comfortable doing art, and not everyone knows they have the authority to do that and power to do that.”

A documentary-style exhibit about the war, “A Concrete of Images: Back from Iraq,” opened earlier this month. It features the photographs of Marine reservist Steve Danyluk and Army Sgt. Eric Edmundson (who would later suffer severe brain injuries). Rounding out the collection are realistic watercolor portraits by Bill Smock, an Indiana National Guardsman who helped operate a radar station near Mosul.

There is no angst in Smock’s art. “Self-Portrait Walking Down from Radar Hill,” for example, is just that. The 58-year-old Smock, a grade-school teacher in Indianapolis, said he converted his artwork into keepsake calendars for his fellow soldiers.

“I wasn’t making a statement pro or con (about the war),” he said. “I was doing artwork for the benefit of soldiers, for their appreciation and also my appreciation for the soldiers. ... It’s a time of history of where those soldiers were in 2005.”

“A Concrete of Images” runs through December.

Mike Ramsey can be reached at (312) 857-2323 or gnsramsey@sbcglobal.net.

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